Best known for her acclaimed debut novel My Name Is Leon, Kit de Waal’s background as the child of an Irish mother and Caribbean father has always bled into her work. Growing up in Birmingham, England she had a largely absent father and a mother who converted from Catholicism to become a Jehovah’s Witness when de Waal was five years old, after a woman knocked on the door to talk about the religion.
“She invited the woman in and the woman never really left” de Waal tells Roisin Ingle, on the latest episode of The Women’s Podcast. She says religion gave her mother, who had undiagnosed mental health issues, an opportunity for redemption. “My mother was rejected by my grandmother for having a baby with a black man … she felt herself in disgrace.”
The Jehovah’s Witness religion was a fresh start, a chance for “forgiveness” de Waal explains. For the author and her four siblings, growing up with the religion was to have far reaching consequences. De Waal, now a successful author, hated books and reading as a child because she was forced to read the bible. She only read for pleasure for the first time in her twenties.
De Waal and her siblings also believed, as preached by the Jehovah’s Witness, that the world was going to end in 1975, this Armageddon prophecy meant in that year “God was going to kill everyone who wasn’t in the religion … and then Jehovah’s Witnesses [would] proceed to make the earth a paradise”.
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Throughout her childhood, de Waal firmly believed she would die as a fifteen-year-old and never get to turn 16. “We all thought we would die … because only good Jehovah’s Witnesses survived”. De Waal did not believe she was “good”. She liked boys, she swore, smoked and stole money from her dad’s trouser pocket. The religious-based sense of impending doom meant she never tried at school, thinking “what’s the point? I’m going to die.”
She explored all of this in her memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes. Writing it increased her compassion for her parents “for them coming to England as immigrants being poor, not knowing the world, trying so hard to assimilate … I dedicated the book to them”.
De Waal went on to develop an intense passion for literature and carved out a career in law which began without any formal training. It was only in her early forties that she decided to try writing. After many years of “writing shite” and being sacked by her agent her debut My Name Is Leon, about a summer in the life of a 9-year-old mixed race boy, was eventually published to huge acclaim. “I wrote it from the heart about a world I knew intimately … it came from the guts of me,” she says.
Her beautiful and moving new novel, The Best of Everything, returns to the theme of belonging and also explores grief, infidelity, race, kindness and caring. She is currently writing a sequel to My Name Is Leon.
Having become a first time novelist at the age of 56, De Waal who also works as a creative writing teacher, is an advocate for women making big moves in middle age. “We aren’t living in the 1960s where you got to 50 and you got out the beige polyester trousers with an elasticated waist, by the way there’s nothing wrong with an elasticated waist. We live in a different world, we are allowed to have a third age, a second wind … it’s never too late”.
You can listen back to this episode in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
